Employment In Federal Civil Service Must Be On Merit – Yemi-Esan

Federal government, through the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HoSF), Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan, has declared that employment and recruitment of new civil servants must be based on merit to get the best hands.

Yemi-Esan, who stated this yesterday during a media parley with media executives in commemoration of Civil Service Week, said that the office of the head of service does not recruit and is the sole responsibility of the Federal Civil Service Commission.

She said, however, they are the ones who give the commission a waiver for employment, transmit the waiver, and let the commission know the vacancies that they can fill through employment.
Yemi-Esan explained that they are not in charge of employment and plead with the commission to ensure that they have a merit-based system for getting people into the service.

“We also tell them that when they get untrainable people into the service, it gives us a lot of headaches, and we do not want that. So, employment into civil service is completely merit-based,” she said.
Yemi-Esan, responding to questions about why some civil servants’ names are absent from the IPPIS, said that enrollment for the IPPIS is very simple if the institution has done the right thing.

“But in a situation where the institution has gotten a waiver to employ 100 for example and they used 250, how will that person get to IPPIS? That is what we see every day.

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“A particular institution took me to the National Assembly, and I did not create enough vacancies. I said vacancy is not something you pluck from the tree.

“You give us your organisational structure, and you tell us your functions. Then, we give you an establishment stating the number of people you can employ on a particular job.

“So, when you now asked for employment, we look at how many people are on the seat and how many vacancies there are, and then we declare a waiver for the number of vacancies,” she said.
She said that some institutions have become too political and want to serve some interests other than government interests.

“So, they employ so many people without the requisite waiver. They cannot go onto the IPPIS; it is not possible. Those are the issues we are dealing with every day.

“Also, the waiver cannot be open-ended when there are monetary implications.
So, most of the time when we give a waiver, the budget office also backs it up, that there is money to pay for X number.

So, if you go and employ outside of that X number, and we discover that many institutions are doing that now because the CMD or the VC has political ambition, they will bring people to employ.
That is not how employment is done. When you see the problematic case, you will know that the wrong thing has been done somewhere along the line,“ she said.